Manja

By Anna Gmeyner   
Translated by Kate Phillips   
Preface by Eva Ibbotson    

Written in 1936-7 by a young Austrian playwright living in exile in London, Manja opens, radically, with five conception scenes all set on the same night in 1920. In the midst of the turbulent Germany of the Weimar Republic, it goes on, equally dramatically, to describe the lives of the children and their families up until 1933 when the Nazis came to power. The four boys and one girl, Manja, become friends, but their companionship is doomed because of the differences between their parents; one father is a left-wing activist, another a Nazi, another a financier, another a Jewish musician.

Yet Manja is far from being a political novel. Its startling originality lies in the way the the political background is perceived, steadily, from the child's point of view. It has been compared  with PB no. 152 Crooked Cross by Sally Carson, who was born the same year as Anna Gmeyner. 

'What is so unusual,' wrote the playwright Berthold Viertel in 1938, 'is the way the novel contrasts the children's community - in all its idealism, romanticism, decency and enchantment - with the madhouse community of the adults.' Meanwhile the Manchester Guardian called it 'a remarkable novel, a book of truth and tenderness' and the New York Times referred to it as 'a tale of terrible beauty'. 

The Preface is by the author's daughter, writer Eva Ibbotson; the new translation is by Kate Phillips.

Hardcover
552 pages
Persephone Books, 2003
Originally published in 1939
‎5.35 x 7.64 inches
ISBN 9781903155295
Literary Fiction